Mr. Men Show Redesign - Miss Trouble

Hey everyone. Sorry if I was absent for a month, had a lot of things to do for February, but I'll explain about one of these days. Moving on, I'll be discussing about the next redesign I worked on, this time it's Little Miss Trouble.

Little Miss Trouble is a little miss who likes causing trouble, mainly telling lies. She's falls under the prankster category of characters, like Miss Naughty. In first debut story, Miss Trouble tells lies about to some of the other Mr. Men that Mr. Small called him names behind their backs (now this is where it's different, as the episode adaptation and book changed things. In the original book, she tells Mr. Uppity and Mr. Clever about it, and they beat him up. In the episode, she tells them as well as Mr. Worry about it, but instead of punching him, they met Mr. Small at a candy shop and wanted to talk to him. Because he was scared, he accidentally stepped backwards on the countertop and injured himself). Anyway, Mr. Small meets up with Dr. Makeyouwell and tells him what the problem is. The doctor finds out about it and tells Mr. Small that he should tell Mr. Bump and Mr. Tickle that Miss Trouble called them names. Now what I don't get is how the Doctor knows it's Miss Trouble. I can get it if he's a wizard like in other stories, but he's not. Regardless, Mr. Bump and Mr. Tickle get mad at the Little Miss and decided to "tickle bump" her. Okay, so it's not alright to have Small get punched, but it's okay for Trouble having the implication that she's getting violated? Then again, it's the opposite effect this series has a problem with like what the 2008 show is suffering. After that mission, the doctor decides to see what's going on with Miss Trouble. The episode added a part where the doctor tells Miss Trouble that she got a taste of her own medicine, and they just brush it off and laughed.

I always remember this character a lot because her story was one of the first ones I watched when getting into the series back in late 2007, though hers was the only Little Miss story on YouTube at the moment until a user uploaded the other 12 episodes.

I originally did her design back in 2010 when I was still new onto redesigning characters. Her design was just a recolor of Miss Giggles design with minor tweaks to make her look like her book counterpart. However, after getting back into the series, I started to dislike the original design I did.

You see, the problem with the Mr. Men franchise is that there's a lot of characters, and aside the fact some of them share similar traits, the other issue is that some of them look similar to each other and would often clash with another. The trouble with Miss Trouble (no pun intended) is that she looks too similar to Miss Sunshine (round yellow Little Misses with freckles and pigtails) Now you can argue that they have some differences, like the hair color, but even in the distance they look too similar. And try to ask someone who doesn't know the franchise and they might get confused that they look similar.

This is kinda the reason why in Thomas and Friends, some characters like the Scottish Twins never got repainted into their blue colors, as they would've clashed with the likes of Edward, who is already blue and a small tender engine. This was even the problem Wilbert Awdry had with the illustrators when Henry was painted blue and readers confused him with Gordon, not helping that he acted like him as well.

I decided to revamp Miss Trouble when I got back into the series, but I didn't know how I was going to redo her. Then my friend Chickie456 from DevaintArt did some Mr. Men families where she did some backstories on the characters from the Mr. Men Show and came up with some parents/foster parents and possibly connected them with some if the book characters (though she's not planning on the book characters at the moment). One of them she was on Miss Naughty (which was the reason I started to like her after disliking her because of someone else before saying she was her least favorite), and on that headcanon, she tells that Miss Naughty is the older sister to Mr. Mischief and Miss Trouble, and that they're twins. When she mentioned that Trouble is the older one by a few minutes, I thought of another series that sprung in mind....

Jason and Michelle Conrad from "3-2-1 Penguins!". I thought basing her looks would suit Miss Trouble as Michelle (at least in the original video) was kinda cheeky and her hair looks different, but still looks like the Pippi Longsticking look Miss Trouble had from the original design. Plus, it would be a nice tribute towards Phil Lollar (who voiced Mr. Strong and Mr. Lazy and the US dub of the Mr. Men Show) as he was one of the creators of the Penguins. And yes, that is him despite what the credits say, as it was a typo someone made.

Because I was smart enough to take screengrabs on some of the episodes for the Big Idea Wikia I created. Though it was still tricky as the Mr. Men characters are just shapes. But luckily was able to draw it out. I did kept some concept of Miss Trouble around the same size as Miss Giggles, though she's somewhat a hybrid design of both Giggles and Mr. Rude, as she is ovalish, but the top is triangular like Mr. Rude.

The only other tweaks I did with her is that I made her skin color more darker, similar to the thumbnail the official Mr. Men YT page did when they uploaded the Miss Trouble adaption, her nose is slightly wider with the color being more bright. I also made the hair more of a mix between Miss Giggles and Daredevil's color, so she has it similar to Madeline. I also wanted to give her unique eyebrows compare to the other characters, so I went with the triangular ones that Thomas has.

 This ended being the final version of Miss Trouble I did! I'm quite proud how this design turned out! So the big question is, how can I make her different from Miss Naughty, due to how some characters from the show absorbed traits from other characters? Well, just go like how she was in her book, someone who would tell lies and make her like a mixture of Michelle Conrad and Amy March. Basically, think of a younger sister-esque personality.

I hope you had a good time reading this post. I'll do more on the other characters I redesigned in the future.

First Doctor in Mr. Men form

Happy 2018 everybody! Sorry I hadn't posted anything yet for awhile, but I decided to start things off of talking about my designs of the Doctor Who characters in Mr. Men and Little Miss form. I'll start off with the First Doctor.

As you can tell from the name, First is the original incarnation of the Doctor's life (or you want to go with the original plan of Power of the Daleks and Brain of Moribus was that he was "not", but this was debunked by the time "The Five Doctors" stated he IS the original) who left his home planet Gallifrey with his granddaughter Susan and traveled time and space with their TARDIS until they settled in 1963 England. Things go well until her schoolteachers Ian Chesterton and Barbara Wright followed her after being suspicious on their pupil, and thus started having adventures with him. The Doctor later traveled with other companions after he dumped Susan and later when Ian and Barbara wanted to go back afterwards.

This incarnation is really grumpy and quite temperamental, but also very wise and can be kind. He does mean well, but because of how be haves around others can lead to the fact he can be rude.

He would meet his end after dealing with the Cybermen as he would collapse from age, but not before meeting Twelfth during the events of the 1986 Cybermen invasion.

Unfortunately, I hadn't watched much of the Old Doctor Who episode episodes that much compare to others. Not because of the dated and dodgy stuff compare to recent episodes, but because either they're hard to come back thanks to some DVDs of his stories being expensive, or because it's hard to know which ones are good as fans can tell you which stories are good or bad. I know people say look on dailymotion, but I'm just busy with other stuff to watch every episode, even those that aren't gone from the BBC.

Thankfully, I was able to watch two of his early serials, the Daleks' debut and the Sensorites that I rented at a library I used to go, and it's a good thing I did as they're very good stories for his era. Though be careful with the prices for the Sensorites, as that is REALLY high in prices, even more than the Two Doctors (at least in Region 1).

Adam Hargreaves' design of the first Doctor

Adam Hargreaves did his design of the first Doctor as part of the first wave of the Doctor Who/Mr. Men crossover books, which is designed after some of the bean shape characters like Mr. Uppity with a few minor tweaks. It's not too bad, but personally I don't like how he keeps switching his monocle at different eyes (a problem I had with Mr. Uppity as well).

Original design of the First Doctor.

I did my design of the First Doctor back in late 2010 after doing Nine,Ten and Eleven in Mr. Men forms and decided to do some on the Classic Doctors. I went with Mr. Grumpy's design, due to how he is like in the show. I also used Mr. Quiet's nose shape as well. This actually worked well as I can fit the costume onto him, as some of the Mr. Men characters are tricky to add clothing on due to them being only shapes. I'm not sure why I picked purple, maybe to just give him some interesting color choices, and it worked quite well.
 

Revamped model design of the First Doctor

When I got back into Mr. Men last year, I decided to revamp him along with the other Doctors (prior to War and Twelfth). Nothing major was changed, other than that I fixed the hair a bit more curved.

I later did a animated piece on the famous Goodbye scene the Doctor says to Susan in her departure story, "The Dalek Invasion of Earth".

Prickles the Cactus

Pilots are often a treasure to behold, either they're good that could've been great shows, or something that are better off as just a one-off sort of thing. Then you have the middle ground where you don't mind it being a one-off, but also like it to continue on. This cartoon is somewhat the middle ground.

Title card of Prickles

During the 1990's, Cartoon Network was trying out different shorts that can be spun off into a full fledged series. They did this a few times, such as "What a Cartoon Show", but they might have viewers pick out which cartoon is the best, which is done in the form of "The Big Pick", a marathon of short cartoons that viewers can vote that can become a series, which they did for both summer of 2000 and 2001. One of the cartoons I wanna talk about is Prickles, a anthropomorphic cactus who lives in Cyclone Ranch with her dad and brother Bert and Egbert, and her main gimmicks is that shes is clumsy and fear of touching water as that makes her puff up. She was created by Denis Morella, and this was the first thing he worked for Cartoon Network after looking at his IMDb page, the other thing prior was Liquid Television for MTV. I was actually unaware about this cartoon until I was replaying some games Cartoon Network used to have called "Summer Resort", a episodic overhead view game where you play as a random character from the pilots and need to help out with the Cartoon Network characters with their problems. Turns out she was one of those characters you play in that game.

One thing that bothers me was that I'm not sure which came out first, as there was not only the pilot, but also a short cartoon released on Cartoon Network's official site prior to the revamp. Internet Archives states that it was in 2003, but the toon itself says it was released in 1999. I assume this was released on a different part of the official site during that time. But I'll discuss about both toons.

The first will be on the flash cartoon, which I found out was actually made alongside the pilot to help promote it. In the toon, Prickles is competing at the Miss Green Teen Pageant 2000, and she has to deal with her rival Becky and partner Cccynthia. Becky does try to juggle to show off and to give Prickles a run for her money by giving her the stuff to juggle as well. This doesn't go well as Marci was trying to eat the rats Prickles was juggling, which causes Becky to drop the goldfish bowls and the water swells up Prickles. Prickles does win, but she dislike the picture.

Like other flash cartoons, there some interactive parts you can poke around, like there's one part where you can make Prickles dance to the music of the jukebox, and the magazine part towards the end.

The other is the pilot which probably might've seen if you were watching Cartoon Network of summer 2000. Here, the ranch is in a severe drought and there's hardly any water to keep it going, as well as keeping everyone thirsty. Her dad Bert tells Prickles to find water using a stick, so both she and Marci decided to travel to find some, which they find a small cloud who was very troublesome until the magic stick pokes him. The cloud agrees to go with the two back to the ranch. Things go well until Sunny decides to be a dick and try to fry the cloud. Prickles calls out on him and whines that he gets carried away, then it gets worse when the cloud calls out for his mom, and torments Sunny for picking at her son and causes it to rain. Good news; no one is thirsty. Bad news; it's flooding. And that's pretty much it.

Both of the toons are pretty good for what they are. I like the colors more from the webtoon, while the animation on the pilot is better animated. The plots themselves aren't remarkable, but they're still very good to watch. The voice acting is very good, my personal favorites are Prickles and Marci. Prickles just sounds innocently adorable, while Marci has the deadpan snark tone which fits them very well.

Unfortunately, Prickles didn't became a full series after that summer, with the winner being  Billy and Mandy. Which I can't blame as that had the more interesting series out of the bunch. However, I still think Prickles could've had some potential to be s series as well, though I think the desert setting would've been boring for some, despite being only two cartoons on the cactus.

So what happened afterwards? Well, according to some users, the cartoon reaired one last time on May 2003 and as I stated above, Prickles became a playable character in the Summer Resort game afterwards. As for the creator, Denis actually got a bigger career when he worked for Disney, first working on the Disney Junior (formerly Playhouse Disney) show Higglytown Heroes, then finally his recent and biggest project Sheriff Callie's Wild West, which like Prickles takes place in the desert and features a talking cactus.

You can watch both cartoons on YouTube and through Internet Archives (which you can watch the webtoon here).

Mr. Men Show Redesign - Mr. Clever

Happy Christmas eve everybody, time for another character from the original Mr. Men I redesigned in Mr. Men Show form, and it's Mr. Clever.

Mr. Clever from the books

Mr. Clever (not to be confused with the Doctor Who character) is a Mr. Men who lives in Cleverland that is in Misterland. As the name suggest, he is very smart and knows everything, or so it seems. One day, he went out for a walk when he stumbled across some of the Mr. Men and brags about him being clever. However, when someone asks him what is the best joke or dish to cook, he doesn't know. By the time he headed back home, Mr. Clever doesn't think he's all that smart. However, like everyone in the books, he recovers and is back to his old self. Despite Arthur Lowe did a audio tack of the story, Mr. Clever never got the animated treatment, although he made a appearance in Little Miss Trouble's story (which is where I first saw the character)

My original design of Mr. Clever, based on Mighty355's design

I originally did the design around late Spring/early Summer of 2010 when some mysterious artwork of some redesigns of rumored characters were going to appear in Season 3 of the Mr. Men Show (though this turned out to be false, and was later found out to be fan designs by a user from DeviantArt named Mighty355. Despite this, I wanna try to do my take of the character if he appeared in the show. I basically used some assets from characters from the show, (Mr. Tickle's body, Mr. Grumpy's hate and Miss Helpful's shoes) based on what the user did. Other pieces I reused are M. Quiet's nose shape and Mr. Nervous' glasses, though modified. I didn't bothered with the ears because the glasses would've made it an issue. I was quite please with the design for a while, until a friend of mine named Jacob Henjes (Trainboy7) told me that he didn't like it that Mr. Clever shares the same hat as Mr. Grumpy (because both Grumpy and Clever wore the same green hat in the books), I guess because he didn't like how some character share the same exact wardrobe.

Revamp designs of Mr. Clever

When I got back into the Mr. Men late last year, I decided to revamp the design. Everything was kept, but I decided to give him a different hat. I was thinking of using a academic cap, a hat either worn by professors or graduates of school and thought it looked good. I'm not sure if this what either Jacob or another friend suggested me, or if I came up with. I did different color schemes for the cap; one that is black with the tassel as the same color as the original hat, or just with the same colors from the original design but swapped. I ended being pleased with it afterwards.

I later did a animation piece during late Spring of this year based on the audio that I mentioned Arthur Lowe narrated, but in the style of the Mr. Men Show, after hearing my friend Lachie was saying he was going to animate Mr. Rush before, and thought on doing so.

Hope to see you all!

Mr. Men/Doctor Who designs - Introduction

So I've been a fan of Doctor Who and the Mr. Men for a while and thought on doing some personal blog posts about my designs of the characters from Doctor Who if they were in Mr. Men and Little Miss form.

For those who don't know, Doctor Who is a science fiction series the BBC aired since 1963 about a alien known as the Doctor, a Time Lord from the planet Gallifrey who can travel in time and space. The initial series was going to teach history lessons, but this drifted away once the science fiction kicked in.

I got into Doctor Who around early 2009 when I decided to give it a watch after some friends online were talking about it, and it was very good! I haven't watch it too much after Series 6 as I started to stop watching it due to other stuff (and no, it wasn't because of how the show was getting worse), but I do go back in and out watching some of the recent clips in and out, as well as the older episodes during the classic era.

My drawing of the (then) 11 Doctors in Mr. Men form

One of the things I wanted to do after getting into drawing again was doing some Doctor Who artwork done in the Mr. Men style, specifically the 2008 show as I was getting my groove for the style, and while I may not be the first one to think of this, I was the first to express it online. I thought both of these franchises together would be interesting as they're both British and the fact the BBC aired these (at least the original Mr. Men from the 1970s). I kinda stopped this sometime after 2011 as I was losing interest of both franchises, but started to get back late last year after hearing about the Doctor Who/Mr. Men crossover books from the BBC, and as I was getting my Mr. Men interest back.

Ian Chesterton, Sarah Jane Smith, Peri Brown and Adric

I'll be posting some of the Doctors, companions, props and other characters from that show in the Mr. Men style.

Mr. Men Show Redesign - Little Miss Late

Hello everybody, I just wanna talk about what this post is all about and why am I doing this.

I have been a fan of the Mr. Men and Little Misses franchise since the mid-late 2000s. Despite I was already too old to like something made for a younger audience, I became attached to the stories and characters that both Roger and Adam Hargreaves created. I originally heard of the franchise back in 2004 when I was 9/10 after finding out the UK Nick Jr. site and played a game about Mr. Bump finding the right bumper car. Then I rediscover it thanks to Daniel Coffey's old videos related to that series after regaining my interest of Thomas and Friends in Summer 2007. I didn't like it at first as there were only a few of the adaptions on YouTube at the time, but quickly loved it after all the Little Miss stories were posted afterwards.

Title card of the Mr. Men Show

Then my interest grew bigger after Cartoon Network aired the 2008 reboot done by Renegade Animations, and I love it ever since. A lot of people often might ask me why I love this show, mainly because it was the reason I started to like cartoons again after I lost interest during most of my middle school years and also gave me the motivation to draw again as well. It was funny and animated pretty well for a flash cartoon, as a lot of people think Flash is a bad way to animate, which I don't find this true as Flash is just a tool to animate. There are a few hiccups here and there in the show, but overall pretty good. Unfortunately, the show itself didn't last that long and ended it's run on October 19th, 2009. I knew the second season wasn't the great compare to the first season (writing wise), but I did think it could've been done better if they let it go on at least another season. However, because of how CN treats their shows by not giving enough attention and the fact there's hardly any advertisements or merchandise based on it, it was quickly dropped and only did repeats on Boomerang for about 3 years until it faded completely. Even the official website of the show and blog were removed around the same time. :( One of the things fans (especially me) like to do was to give interpretations on how characters that haven't made it into the show would look like in the show. It's not a new things, as various fandoms on popular franchises would do the same. But I thought it would be fun to do designs on how the book characters would look in the 2008 show style. And the other reason is because of the books' history of characters and I feel cheated that the background characters that show in random episodes aren't based on any characters. I know it's not important and imagine Dillydale is already big, but still, I like to see familiar faces rather than just generic palette swaps. I know not everyone's gonna agree with my takes, but it's just the way how I'm wired. There's some ideas that would work, and then there's others that might not. The first character I wanna show was Little Miss Late.

Little Miss Late from the books

Little Miss Late is one of the character Roger Hargreaves created when he first started the Little Miss books. Her story is that she is always late for everything and would celebrate holidays in the wrong time. One of the things the books have is either one of the these camps; that character would have to change their bad habits (Mr. Greedy, Nosy and Grumpy), that character tries to find a job that suits him/her (Mr. Bump and Mr. Slow), using their abilities to help others (Mr. Happy and Mr. Funny) or just simply a daily occurrence (Miss Scatterbrain). Miss Late was in both the job finding/daily occurrence type of story. I always liked Miss Late after watching her story adaption from the 1980's, mainly because of her theme played throughout the episode.

I originally did my take of the character sometime early 2010 as I was doing a tribute of most of the green characters from both books and 2008 show. I know she was never green in the books, but I like the color she had from the 1983 episode as it looks better and there's hardly any green colored Little Misses, even in the books. One of the things I did add onto her was that she had a watch (similar to how Mr. Noisy had a megaphone in the 2008 show) so she can keep track of time, but either it shows the wrong time, or just doesn't pay attention. The funny thing is that if the watch is on the wrong time, it's because of not Miss Late putting the wrong time, but because the watch may go haywire, like she's cursed. Because of this, she's not popular with the folks of Dillydale. The irony is that it's usually Miss Naughty who might "help" her because her pranks sometimes might get Miss Late arrive on time.

Left is the original redesign from 2010, while the right is the revamp I did back in 2011.

I decided to go back and redo the design almost two years later as I wasn't satisfied with it, plus it was it akin to the original look. This design was new with a different hair style and new color scheme. I went with the slightly darker green skin and removed the freckles as I didn't want to clash with Miss Dotty/Ditzy. Another change was the watch, as I made it digital to give it a modern look and made her eyes has lashes, similar to how Miss Bossy was given in the show when see was introduced in the second season.

Modelsheet of my Miss Late redesign

I later did a model sheet reference of her years later when I got back into the Mr. Men and wanted to update my artwork on the characters. 

I really hope you like this and maybe have an interest of what I showed to you guys! I might do more blog posts like this if you guys like it! 

Hope to see you all!

New blog

Hello everyone, I decided to start a new blog series if reviews and thoughts as the old one I did didn't do that well, and wanted to do some writing reviews on certain things I wanna talk about.